TYPOLOGY

Blog

  • Ambiguous Figures: Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning

     

    It’s the beginning of April, and in honour of Max Ernst’s birthday (April 2) and National Poetry Month, we thought we’d do a little feature on Ernst, key figure in the history of Dada and Surrealism, and Dorothea Tanning, prolific artist and late-blooming poet who also happens to have been Ernst’s fourth wife.

    A dashing and charismatic pair, they met in New York in 1942, when Ernst was still married to Peggy Guggenheim. Four years later, upon his divorce from Guggenheim, Ernst married Tanning in a double Beverly Hills wedding with Juliet Browner and Man Ray. Settling first in Sedona, and then the south of France, Ernst and Tanning continued their innovative and ever-evolving artistic practices, encompassing painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, filmmaking, costume and set design, book illustration, and writing.

    (more…)

  • Air America: Mesmerizing wind map by hint.fm

    Beautiful interactive map of the wind in motion as it flows over the US in near realtime. Click to see today’s wind patterns as well a gallery of past patterns and a link to the website of the map’s collaborative creators, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. Zooming and tracking create interesting effects too.

    (more…)

  • Object Lessons at Proteus Gowanus

    While we’re on the topic of emulation-worthy organizations (see previous post on Nudashank), we would be remiss if we didn’t profile one of the most intriguing and exciting exhibition spaces we’ve seen in a while. Proteus Gowanus, tucked into a turn-of-the-century former box factory just off its namesake canal in Brooklyn, is a fascinating mash-up of art gallery, cabinet of curiosity, history museum, natural science lab, artist’s studio, and bookstore/library. Their stated mission is to “create an alternative, culturally rich environment…where the boundaries between the artist and non-artist fade, where images and ideas from disparate disciplines are juxtaposed to create new meanings.” This delights us, as with our own focus on curatorial experimentation and wide-ranging interest in all aspects of visual culture, TYPOLOGY aspires to become a similarly hybrid space from which to stimulate dialogue and ideas between artists, art forms, images, objects, and audiences. Like a smaller, Canadian Proteus Gowanus, we’ll seek interdisciplinary collaborations to create a spirited and engaging space for exploration and discovery.

    (more…)

  • A little love for Baltimore: Nudashank turns 3

    Nudashank, an independent, artist-run gallery space in Baltimore, Maryland, is celebrating their third anniversary this week. Founded by Seth Adelsberger and Alex Ebstein in 2009, the gallery is dedicated to showcasing young and emerging artists in group, two-person and solo exhibitions. Over the past three years, Nudashank has shown the work of over 150 artists from Baltimore and beyond, fulfilling a mission to bring new blood into the Baltimore scene, benefitting regional artists and providing a new venue for local, national, and international artwork. The gallery is located on the third floor of the H&H building in downtown Baltimore, which also houses numerous other artist-run galleries and performance spaces.

    (more…)

  • Typologies within typologies: 100 Abandoned Houses and the Heidelberg Project


    We love typologies here at Typologica—quite obviously, considering they are our namesake. All that collecting and categorizing serves us curatorially-inclined folk well, facilitating critical connection-making on so many levels. As a scientific method, the use of typologies has existed for centuries within a tradition of exploration, classification, and analysis, but from the late 1950s when Hilla and Bernd Becher famously debuted their photographic archive of industrial structures, calling it Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Constructions, typological methods within art have become widely appropriated and applied to all manner of people, places, and things.

    (more…)

  • Spring Fever (or, how about some Howard Fonda on this bright, beautiful day?)


    …
    We tried mightily to write that pithy, well-researched post for you today, really we did. But with all this glorious sunshine making a mockery of our efforts (and our computer screens), how could we presume to argue with the very forces of nature on this, the first day of spring?

    And so, instead of our regularly scheduled post, we bring you these exuberant images from Howard Fonda, an artist whose colourful palettes and experimental/experiential approaches to painting are quite literally reflective of his own philosophically humanist leanings, mostly sunny disposition, and sincere generosity of spirit.

    (more…)

  • Local bookshop love: magazines at The Monkey’s Paw, moving sale at Of Swallows


    …
    It’s a good weekend to be in Toronto, as two of our best local bookshops have great stuff in store. In the always eclectic and unusual front window of The Monkey’s Paw on Dundas West, three original issues of General Idea’s FILE Megazine are prominently displayed. All three are from the art periodical’s early 1980s incarnation, which saw the masthead’s redesign after Time-Life sued the artists for copyright infringement in their parody of the iconic red rectangle. In its place is the layout you see here, which accurately represents the surprisingly beautiful design of the interior. The issue pictured above is priced at $100, which a cursory internet search reveals to be a third less than most other available issues out there.

    (more…)

  • Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics: The Ferrofluid videos

    The name says it all. Watch and be mesmerized.
    (Click images to view in YouTube)

    (more…)

  • If I had a million dollars: A selection of artworks available online from The Armory Show and others

    In recent years there has been an unprecedented rush into online contemporary art sales, a formerly taboo practice among gallerists accustomed to a fair amount of opacity in their dealings. My, how things have changed, with well-known commercial galleries such as David Zwirner and White Cube, not-for-profit spaces including Artists Space and SculptureCenter, and even museums such as the Whitney and the New Museum unashamedly making works available through Artspace and other online venues. Last week, The Armory Show announced an exclusive partnership with Paddle8 to present artworks for collectors to preview, reserve, and purchase in advance of this Thursday’s opening. Following in the footsteps of the online-only VIP Art Fair, The Armory Show is hedging its bets that having an online presence will extend its reach into new markets far beyond the tri-state area.

    (more…)

  • Valley of the dolls: Susan Low-Beer’s uncanny portraits


    …
    Recently we saw Susan Low-Beer’s newest work in an exhibition titled About Face at David Kaye gallery. Twenty-six heads mounted to cylindrical bases or spools and displayed on shelves lining three of the gallery’s walls were the central focus of the show. All of the heads were created using the same mold, into which Low-Beer pressed an array of texturally varied clay pieces in order to produce the range of dispositions on display. The artist called them emotional portraits.

    (more…)